Tag Archives | Conspiracy Theory

The Hawaiian health official who verified the authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate died in a small plane crash.

The plane, carrying a pilot and eight passengers, went down Wednesday in the water a half mile off the Hawaiian island of Molokai. The lone fatality was Loretta Fuddy, who has served as state health director since January 2011.

Fuddy, 65, made national news in April 2011 when she verified the authenticity of certified copies of President Obama’s birth certificate. Obama had requested the release to curb claims by so-called “birthers” that he was born in Kenya and not eligible to be president.

“There was catastrophic engine failure,” Makani Kai Air President Richard Schuman told Honolulu-based KITV. Schuman said the cause of the engine failure had not yet been determined.

Why does the establishment media find the life and death of JFK so darn elusive? It’s been 50 years and they still can’t wrap their heads around it! Lotsa talk about the “myth” and “legend” of Camelot. Lotsa dismissals of “conspiracy theories.” And, not coincidentally, a complete blackout of conspiracy facts. I wonder why people distrust the media…in this piece on Newsvandal.com:

Ironically, the establishment media incessantly theorizes about “what ifs” and groans about conspiracy theories while the people they accuse in absentia of being “theorists” dutifully, often heroically, gather and share conspiracy facts.

Tune into CBS or NBC or ABC or anywhere around the dial, and you do not see James DiEugenio or David Talbot or James Douglass. Instead you get Chris Matthews and Rob Lowe and, most disappointingly of all, Ken Burns. They speak like people who haven’t read. They embrace a theory they haven’t questioned.… Read the rest

Is the notion that our planet’s roundness a massive conspiracy perpetrated across centuries? The fascinating Flat Earth Society says yes, and attempts to address all of your doubts in their comprehensive FAQ guide:

The evidence for a flat earth is derived from many different facets of science and philosophy. The simplest is by relying on ones own senses to discern the true nature of the world around us. The world looks flat, the bottoms of clouds are flat, the movement of the sun; these are all examples of your senses telling you that we do not live on a spherical heliocentric world

Perhaps the best example of flat earth proof is the Bedford Level Experiment. In short, this was an experiment preformed many times on a six-mile stretch of water that proved the surface of the water to be flat. It did not conform to the curvature of the earth that round earth proponents teach.

The New York Post reports on one of the world’s most sought-after missing brains:

John F. Kennedy’s noodle didn’t get buried with him. “Not all the evidence from the assassination is at the National Archives. One unique, macabre item from the collection is missing — President Kennedy’s brain,” writes James Swanson.

During JFK’s autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the brain was placed in a stainless-steel container with a screw-top lid. “For a time, the steel container was stored in a file cabinet in the office of the Secret Service,” writes Swanson.

The brain was later taken to the National Archives, where it was “placed in a secure room designated for the use of JFK’s devoted former secretary…In October 1966, it was discovered that the brain, the tissue slides and other autopsy materials were missing — and they have never been seen since.”

An investigation ordered by then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark failed to recover the missing brain — which remains unaccounted for today.

Like many in the USA, especially perhaps those of us not allowed to go to work right now or with reason to feel anxious about the future, I’m particularly pre-occupied by these issues at the moment, and the various impediments to clear, community-spirited thinking.

And then researchers serendipitously dropped another relevant study on cognitive bias into the literature. Lewandowsky, Gignac and Oberauer conducted a study of people in the USA. It’s here in PLOS One.

They discuss a way that science communication processes can sometimes backfire. When the views of people seen as experts converge on an issue, it has a strong influence on other people’s thinking. So generally, a strong scientific consensus can be convincing to many others, too. Climate science is an example where growing consensus among scientists reduced the influence of climate change denial.

Via Forbes, a video from a Defcon conference presenter who hacked his E-ZPass and found that his car's location was being tagged continuously while he drove through New York City:

He hacked his RFID-enabled E-ZPass to set off a light and a “moo cow” every time it was being read. Then he drove around New York. His tag got milked multiple times on the short drive from Times Square to Madison Square Garden in mid-town Manhattan…and also on his way out of New York through Lincoln Tunnel, again in a place with no toll plaza.
At Defcon, where he presented his findings, Puking Monkey said he found the reading of the E-ZPass [in non-toll situations] “intrusive and unsettling.”

In January, the Daily Mail reported that leaked emails suggested that the United States was planning to stage a chemical weapons attack which would be blamed on the Assad regime and justify military action against Syria.

The article was subsequently deleted, with the Mail apologizing and explaining that the emails had turned out to be fabricated.

Is this a case of a hoax and shoddy tabloid reporting? Or a possible conspiracy? The original article can be viewed via the Internet Archive:

Leaked emails have allegedly proved that the White House gave the green light to a chemical weapons attack in Syria that could be blamed on Assad’s regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country.

A report released on Monday contains an email exchange between two senior officials at British-based contractor Britam Defence where a scheme ‘approved by Washington’ is outlined explaining that Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons.

On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to Lance deHaven-Smith, Florida State University professor and author of ‘Conspiracy Theory in America’, about some the US’ most controversial events and how labeling truth-seekers as ‘conspiracy theorists’ damages democracy.

It’s hard to figure whether this adds to or takes away from conspiracy theories concerning the dramatic and puzzling tragedy. Via LAist:

The grainy video comes from a surveillance camera outside Pizzeria Mozza on Highland Avenue and Melrose not far from the crash site. Michael Krikorian, a writer and the boyfriend of Mozza’s owner Nancy Silverton, turned the video over to LAPD not long after the crash but he only released the video publicly yesterday.

It’s clear from the video that Hastings’ Mercedes-Benz coupe was going incredibly fast. It’s hard to tell, but it look like his brake lights flicker shortly before the crash. The car bursts into flames almost instantly. The engine was found 200 feet from the scene of the crash.